Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds

WikiProject Birds

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Category:Birds of (African countries)

Isee back in 2016 someone deleted Categories: Birds of...(African countries)but just for the African countries, nowhere else. Long term project is to try to restore them in some fashion....Pvmoutside (talk) 11:06, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

It was probably due to a large overlap between different countries and the arbitrary nature of confining birds to specific political regions, though I don't know why this wasn't done for any other continent. Also, the timestamp for this comment didn't have (UTC) at the end so it wasn't archiving properly, fixed that for you. Reconrabbit 14:51, 30 December 2024 (UTC)

Preferred source for synonyms?

What is the preferred source (if any) of this project for synonyms? Specifically in the context of listing synonyms in taxoboxes, as I've found that many bird articles have incomplete and/or unreferenced synonyms lists in their taxoboxes that I'd like to fix. I know we generally follow the IOC World Bird List for taxonomy, but they don't list synonyms for each species, only its placement and accepted common/binomial name. Sorry if this is a silly question, I just couldn't find any particular guidance regarding synonyms on the Taxonomy & resources page. Cheers, Ethmostigmus 🌿 (talk | contribs) 03:53, 6 December 2024 (UTC)

For bird synonyms there is AviBase although the data is a bit hard to access/download. The HBW/BirdLife (v9.0) downloadable spreadsheet has a "Synonyms" column, with values for 22% of species (and HBW and IOC have 93% identical species). Two somewhat dated sources are Peters's Check-List of Birds of the world and Hellmayr's Catalogue of Birds of the Americas and the adjacent Islands. Both are in the BHL. I suppose most names are in GBIF, too, but I'm not sure how reliable GBIF is; that probably varies with the quality of its constituent databases (IOC too is slurped into GBIF but GBIF contained an obsolete version of IOC last time I looked) - Kweetal nl (talk) 04:46, 6 December 2024 (UTC)

Merge plovers?

We have a page Charadriidae for the family which includes the plovers, dotterels, and lapwings. These three are lumped under the name plover; we have a page plover for that, too. This of course covers more or less the same material as the Charadriidae page. Should the two be merged? My suggestion is for yes, at the Charadriidae page, and make 'plover' a redirect to that. This is a follow up to recent requests at talk:plover. TSventon (talk) 12:48, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

Plovers covers subfamily Charadriinae (according to the taxobox) or the whole family (according to the lede), while the Charadriidae article claims to cover the plovers, lapwings (subfamily Vanellinae according to its article) and dotterels (which seem a mixed bunch, some in subfamily Charadriinae). It's unclear what source is being used for the subfamilies or if these common name divisions match the taxonomy as neatly. The IOC refers to the whole family as plovers, but H&M4 says the family includes plovers and lapwings and also recognises a third subfamily, Pluvialinae for Pluvialis. The article for latter places the genus in Charadriinae. I think these articles may need some work before and decision on merging can be made.  —  Jts1882 | talk  14:41, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

I posted this as a response to a helpdesk question and my knowledge is limited to what I have read in the articles. Improving the articles would be a good first step. TSventon (talk) 15:02, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

@TSventon @Jts1882 - I've been forgetting to look in on this page for a few days. The problem with the subfamilies is that some at least, notably Charadriinae, are paraphyletic, so perhaps they are probably best dropped altogether. This is e.g. why half of Charadrius was split out into Anarhynchus: the latter proved more closely related to Vanellus than to Charadrius sensu stricto. See Fig. 6 in Černý and Natale 2022 for more details. - MPF (talk) 18:17, 22 December 2024 (UTC)

Years in birding and ornithology

The most recent article we have is 2021 in birding and ornithology (and that is tagged for notability); we have nothing for 2022, 2023 or 2024. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:13, 19 December 2024 (UTC)

2021 songbird illness

I just created a stub for the 2021 songbird illness. It may be of interest to members of this project. Thriley (talk) 15:56, 20 December 2024 (UTC)

Question about commented out references

Greetings and felicitations. When I edit bird articles I sometimes find a commented-out stub of a reference, as was the case with this edit to Harpy eagle. What are they for? —DocWatson42 (talk) 09:14, 30 December 2024 (UTC)

I don't know the reason for this particular case, but when making larger edits/updates to articles, it happens that some references are no longer in use. Instead of removing them completely, some editors prefer to simply comment them out if they think they could be useful again when the article is expanded in the future. An alternative, and probably better way to keep and organise unused but useful references is the Template:Refideas, which is placed on the talk page but will create a info box that is seen when editing the article. --Jens Lallensack (talk) 11:08, 30 December 2024 (UTC)

My incorrect guess was that it was a left over when converting to inline references, as I've used comments until I'm sure all are moved. However, it seems just to have been a way of leaving a note or reminder. A commented out reference was first added to the external links section in 2007, with later comments in the reference section here and here (both in 2008) and here in 2010. I think they can safely be removed now.  —  Jts1882 | talk  11:57, 30 December 2024 (UTC)

There was a previous discussion about these at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Tree_of_Life/Archive_60#FieldianaZool,_etc._comments. Almost all of the commented out references were added by a single no-longer active editor (Dysmorodrepanis). More than 1000 of them were deleted following the TOL discussion. I believe the intention in adding them was that the could be used to expand the article. However, most of these that I look up weren't actually good sources for expanding the article.

For example, one of these I looked at was a checklist of birds from a national park in Bhutan. Most of the species mentioned in that checklist just were a entry in a row in a table. Threatened species present in the park had a couple sentences about where they were found in the park (potentially some useful information about habitat).

Overall, the commented out references Dysmorodrepanis added don't seem to really be selectively chosen as useful references but are just a random scattering of various journal articles that happened to mention a species. I think they should all be removed. Plantdrew (talk) 17:43, 30 December 2024 (UTC)

Okay. I make a note of that (on my user page, not in an article :-) ). Thank you. ^_^ —DocWatson42 (talk) 03:29, 31 December 2024 (UTC)